Comment: Student unrest

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The high drop-out rate from universities - approaching one in four students leaving before their courses end - is evidence of the dispiriting experience for the hundreds of thousands of students concerned, particularly at the six London and South-Eastern institutions which are in the top 12 of the drop-out league. It is also expensive: a report from the Public Accounts Committee published today puts the cost to the public purse of early drop-outs at £1 billion a year. This is embarrassing for a Government which set great store by its ambition to ensure half of all school-leavers enter higher education. The size of that target, combined with the deterrent of tuition fees, made it likely that many students would fail to finish their degrees.

The Public Accounts Committee blames the fact that universities are now less good at nurturing students. Staff are recruited and rewarded for qualities other than teaching - for the amount they publish and, more recently, the extent to which their work is cited elsewhere. Larger numbers mean that the individual attention which tutors were once able to give their students is increasingly rare.

It is time for the Government to refocus its approach. It could start by reassessing its unrealistic attempt to get ever greater numbers of young people to attend university, stop wasting time lecturing Oxford and Cambridge over admissions and concentrate instead on ways of ensuring those who do go to university succeed in finishing their degrees.